Are you tired of hearing about the eclipse? If so, this post is not for you. Or maybe it is. Yeah, I was heartily sick of hearing about it too, days ago. I vaguely remember the one from 1979 and it wasn’t all that special. Sure, there was eerie spooky light, like dusk but with light and shadows at all the wrong angles. But mostly it was an excuse to stand outside doing nothing for a while.
I tried not to roll my eyes when my daughter and her husband bought the special glasses and planned to drive to South Carolina where it would be 100% totality, versus the 93% projected for this area. I mean, good for them. Sincerely. I applaud their enthusiasm.
But as for me? I didn’t really care. I know, I’m horribly jaded. Until I looked out at my deck about a half hour before total eclipse and saw this:
I’d heard people talk about this online, about how sunlight dappled through the trees would let you “see” the eclipse. And I thought, “Yeah, right. Sure it will.”
Okay, here’s where I admit I’ve never paid much attention to dappled sunlight. Never really noticed, or cared, that it presents itself as little circles. LIKE THE SUN. I don’t know, maybe I just assumed the spaces between leaves were all perfect circles. Or something.
Suddenly, here was something VERY COOL. And just as suddenly, I was all excited about the eclipse.
So I took a ton and a half of pictures of the little sunlight crescents and their progression on my deck. Why, yes, I am going to subject you to them. But I’ll put them in a slideshow, so as not to completely overwhelm my blog (and people’s RSS feeds).
If you can’t see it in your feed, it’s here:
Isn’t that cool? I even made a short video, because I realized that when there was a light breeze, the little crescents moved around, winking in and out, and looked a bit like a kaleidoscope effect. You have to watch closely to see it, as the wind was very light today (we just won’t even talk about my less-than-steady video skills). Here:
Good grief. Short of creating a YouTube account, I had to first post the video to facebook and then insert the URL here. *sigh* Sure hope I didn’t break anything.
There aren’t many “after” photos, as the sunlight shifted and was hitting the maple tree at an angle that no longer allowed for the dappled effect. But did you notice how the crescents moved from the upper right to the top and then to the upper left?
I’m writing this at roughly 8:30 PM and my daughter and her husband are still slowly making their way home through horrendous traffic. Current ETA 9:15. (Update: After a six-hour drive, roughly twice as long as it took to get there, they’re home!)
I pleased that my eclipse watching experience didn’t include that sort of nonsense. And I’m really glad I watched.
Were you able to see it in your area? Did you watch? More important, did you pay attention to the dappled sunlight? I’ll never again look at it in quite the same way.
KD James 